Official opening

10:30am Saturday 8th February

Please join us for juice and morning tea

All welcome!

From the age of 12 I was addicted to paint: its tactile quality, the smell, and the feel. Forty years later I am still obsessed. The subject for me is of less consequence than the simple act of applying paint. As long as the shapes within the picture plane harmonise with one another, the obsession can continue.     Herman Pekel

Pekel’s paintings strive for immediate and lasting visceral impact, sought with the use of rich and harmonious tones. Attention is paid to detail but not to the extent that all of the oxygen is sucked from the painting. In the hands of a lesser artist, or illustrator, there can be a temptation to make an image extraordinary and graphically tight. Pekel shows restraint in the opposite direction, by preserving the energy associated with a paintings creation, and sometimes mischievously leaving clues indicating how it was made. At their best, they achieve a potent sense of place, not only because of the artist’s intimate knowledge of his subject matter, but also because a degree of mystery and memory is deliberately embedded. If the viewer has memories of the same locations, they cannot help but meet the artist’s at some halfway point.